Visualizing data is an old commerce. The potent mix of Internet & the latest generation of web browsers bestows an awesome opportunity to take an urge to visualize to the next level- to create interactive & live graphics that have the ability to reach of gazillion of people.
JavaScript is the modernized languages for modern web browsers. In addition, this is the most widely installed languages across the globe. This is the only language that you can be confident enough to be installed on the user’s system. Simultaneously, all modernized web browsers can provide SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) that includes mobile devices that are disabled to supply Flash. The combination of SVG & JavaScript allows everyone- to create sophisticated charts which are accessible by million of Internet users. And all credit goes to D3 that brings these technologies together, which is now simply a straightforward task.
D3
D3- a JavaScript “library” for building customization data visualization or producing dynamic, interactive data visualizations in myriad web browsers. It is also known as just “D3” that means Data-Driven Documents.
Simply, D3 is data visualization in the web browser.
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D3 library allows to manipulation elements of a web page in the context of a set of the data and these elements can be HTML, SVG. It can be introduced, edited or removed according to the contents of the dataset.
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D3 has been used to create a scatter graph since the emergence of it.
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It is used to arrange SVG circle elements as in their cx & cy attributes are the set of the x & y values of the elements in the data set. And scaled the map from their natural units in pixels.
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The huge benefit of using D3 is that without creating an entire new plotting language, D3 exposes the designer directly to the web page is the existing technology in the web browser can be leveraged.
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It also allows the designers using the existing tools which have been developed for web design as in Chrome’s Developer & Firefox’s Firebug tools.
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Rather creating the traditional visualization toolkit which is typically placed a heavy wrapper between the web page & designer whereas D3 is only focused on rendering helper functions to deal with common tasks as in creating axes & axis tricks & advanced tasks as in laying out graph visualizations or chord diagrams. In a nutshell, after learning curve, the web designer is opened up to the great world of interactive, modern & animated data visualization.
Why D3?
D3 allows for clean code that is responsible for generating interactive visualizations that work in web browsers & mobile devices similarly.
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By using D3, you can produce the basics as in bar charts, lists, scatter graphs & line charts.
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It concentrates only on representing data as you can use it whatever you would like as simple DOM (Document Object Model) elements, a Canvas or as the presentation layer.
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The data Manipulation in D3 is pretty simple and you can create static & interactive graphics.
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The key & major difference between D3 & other generation graphic tools, is the canvas is the web page in a modernized web browser which is a piece of technology that is fundamentally interactive. In a nutshell, with minimal effort, you can introduce basic user interactions that are using standard browser events.
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You can build up rich visualizations by merging interaction with the capabilities to animate the elements of the web page.
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Examples of using D3: Stacked Bar Chart, Pie Chart, Custom Charting, World Map etc.
Takeaway
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The D3 uses pre-built JavaScript functions to pick the elements, style them, create SVG objects, dynamic effects, add transitions or tool tips to them.
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The next noticeable thing is that D3 has worked amazingly well due to the reason that it is quite flexible as in it does work seamlessly with web technologies. It is also flexible as the client side web technologies stack i.e. HTML, CSS & SVG.
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D3 gives scrum benefits over other tools as in it is not limited to medium areas of the web page as in Raphael.js, Paper.js or other SVG or canvas based libraries.
